Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brandon James Rose. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Brandon James, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

I definitely agree the world needs to hear more stories about growing and scaling a business than just the success. The success of WIS started with the struggles of my 4 previous businesses. Cumulatively I compounded my experience from previous ventures and started a digital marketing agency. After successfully scaling other people’s businesses into the 7 figures, I decided I can do it for myself in an industry that I am passionate about, timepieces. With my extensive digital marketing experience, I started to identify the niche, the TAM (total addressable market) and margins, and marketing avenues. Since I am already engrained in the horology industry, I understood the customer, their pain points, and where they live.
This made it significantly easier to comprehend growth, scale, and key KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Creating a website, managing social media, email marketing, creating ads, etc was nothing new to me. That was the easiest part! The challenges started with scale, mainly around inventory. It was difficult to compete in the market with limited resources to fulfill MOQs ( Minimum Order Quantities ). So bootstrapping WIS by myself, I was able to get the most popular 6 colors in 3 sizes ( 20mm, 22mm, 24mm) to fit most watch brands. WIS is now at a point of needing employee help, but also trying to increase our product offering which has been challenging on measuring the ROI ( return on investment).

Ambassadors have been a massive help to Watch Innovation Straps. With now over 60 ambassadors worldwide, we can lower our marketing budget while keeping revenue the same. Micro influencers are much more beneficial than macro influencers. They take content that we can repurpose, they post to their audience offering discount commission codes, they leave 5 star reviews, and give us direct feedback to improve our product line.

Since creation we have focused on growing organically through email, social media, and SEO. This has been the best for growing our subscriber base and making sure we can deliver a good product and customer service in a scalable way.

Brandon James, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My entrepreneurial journey started while I was a Sophomore at The University of Alabama and started my first company RoseGold Apparel. This is when I started to learn how to build a website, social media, etc. Upon graduation I moved to Miami where I was hired as an analyst for one of the largest watch strap companies in the world. I was quickly promoted to VP of Operations and helped scale them from $50k/month to over $300k/ month in under 9 months. It was at this time when people started reaching out to me to help scale their businesses. After a couple years of working as a digital marketing specialist, I came back to my passion of horology. With further knowledge in website development, social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, ads management, etc I decided to create Watch Innovation Straps out of passion and market awareness.
Within the first 6 months, WIS crossed a 6 figure run rate, 93% gross margins, 4.3M impressions on Pinterest, 12k+ followers on instagram, 60+ ambassadors internationally, featured in 3 GQ Magazines, hold a 4.9 star google rating, and more. We are significantly proud of these numbers, and now looking for an investor to come in and help with our inventory orders. We truly cannot keep enough stock on hand which is a good problem to have!
We plan to release even more colors, styles, and materials of watch bands to better equip watch enthusiasts around the world.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Building a social media presence takes consistency. Since the day of creation, we have posted at least once a day and sometimes up to 3 times a day. Additionally, it is important to use hashtags for your niche to entice your target audience to find you easier.
A main contributing factor to our social media growth was the use of ambassadors. Every industry is different, but a cost effective way to slow grow your audience is to use micro influencers. By sending a watch strap, ambassadors would take content for us to repurpose, as well as post to their audience. Additionally, we would give them commission codes and discount links for their audience which started to snowball the organic traffic. Lastly, each ambassador would leave us a google review and give us direct feedback on improving our product line.

This has been a very strong way to pass 10k followers quite quickly. The icing on the cake is to stay engaged. It is roughly 1-2 hours a day of interacting with DMs, comments, reposting pictures, etc. Staying involved in the community is the best way to ensure your marketing efforts pay dividends months and years later.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to unlearn was optimism. It is great to have passion and always think positive, but throughout my entrepreneurial journey, I have learned to take all expectations off the table and to only focus on the next tasks. If you think too far ahead or put too much energy on a connection, or a collaboration, etc it will only leave you disappointed. There will always be more problems than expected and typically always costs more too – So plan accordingly and take each day at a time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wisstraps.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wisstraps/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wisstraps
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wis-watch-straps/
• Twitter: https://x.com/wisstraps
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@wisstraps
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/wis-watch-straps-dallas
• Other: Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/wisstraps/

Image Credits

Instagram:
@horologyhues
@wa666ou
@tlc__watches
@the_timist_ig
@realwatchbrothers
@lee.hcn92
@wristybizzness